Bloggers to UTA?!



(image via chazzreinhold via nytimes)

Imagine you are a talented blogger read by thousands but lacking in mainstream credit (Hmm. Who could that be?). Your ideas are frequently stolen, unattributed, by other forms of media. You have little recourse and fairly little upwards mobility. Welcome to the world of blogging. If only you had an agent. Yesterday's Old Gray Lady tackled the novel idea of bloggers actually getting agents to help navigate the complex world of showbiz. UTA Online's Brent Weinstein, Jason U. Nadler, Barrett D. Garese and Ryan Reber will be on the lookout for web talent. To wit:

"The move by the United Talent Agency .. best known as the home of comedians like Vince Vaughn and Jack Black, filmmakers like M. Night Shyamalan and television producers like Dick Wolf and David Chase .. amounts to a bet, albeit a modest one, that Web video is on a growth curve similar to that of cable television a generation ago. It is also a return by Hollywood's core talent representatives to the sort of new-media business they tested, without great success, at the peak of the dot-com boom.

"The goal this time around, executives say, is not only to recruit the next generation of television and film writers and directors from the relative obscurity of sites like YouTube and Revver. It is also to help the major Web portals that are hungry for original content to find the creative people they need .. just as movie studios have long turned to talent agencies when looking for new directors, screenwriters and actors.

"'..It starts with just helping identify people on both sides of the aisle,.. said Brent Weinstein, head of the new division, UTA Online. ..The barrier to entry is so low, everybody is now a potential artist. So there..s this great unwashed of talent out there, 99.999 percent of which is probably not good enough to have a traditional film and television career. But on the Internet, a lot of different types of things go.'"

Where does The Corsair sign?